John Boeglin holds up the most recent picture he has of Jamie--a mugshot.

Jamie Boeglin has been missing for over a year, and her family says they’re having a hell of a time getting the Fort Worth police to investigate. That’s what John Boeglin, Jamie’s brother, told me for a cover story I wrote in the Dallas Voicea couple weeks ago. “Missing Inaction” is about the Boeglin family’s complicated feelings about their missing sibling, who is a homeless transgender woman:

Jamie Boeglin lived in Fort Worth, but she didn’t really have any kind of permanent home to go missing from.

Sometimes she crashed at her brother’s house on the west side or squatted in an abandoned house. She’d spend a night at a shelter here or there, or just sleep on the street. Many times, she could have listed her address as a jail cell after she’d been picked up for shoplifting or fighting.

Jamie Boeglin did have one place she could reliably be found — the AIDS Outreach Center where she went to refill her medicine. There, she’d chat up the case workers and get her upcoming medical and mental health appointments in order. She might miss a few of those — could be jail time, could be she’d landed in the hospital — but she always, always came back to seek help from the folks at the AOC.

Except this month, it’ll have been one year since Jamie Boeglin picked up her medication. No one — not her family, not her doctors, not her counselors — has seen her since May 18, 2010.

Read the rest here, as well as a sidebar in which I also address some of the specific challenges faced by transgender people in terms of addiction, HIV and homelessness.

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About andrea grimes

Andrea is a journalist living in Austin, TX. She has a master's degree in anthropology and did her thesis work on gender and stand-up comedy. Seriously. Also, she has a bunch of cats. Three of them. Is three a bunch? Discuss.

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This is a blog about sex, gender and feminism in Texas. It was borne of love for righteous internet activism, Twitter hashtags and beer. And whiskey. And cats. It is mainly written and edited by Austin journalist and anthropologist Andrea Grimes because she loves to put off real-life responsibilities in favor of blogging. Fellow contributors include graduate students, journalists and corporate shills writing under assumed names. We are always looking for more voices.

If you're a Texan interested in writing with us, please e-mail Andrea at (her first name dot her last name) at gmail.com.

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